


Avalanche Weather

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Avalanches, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Hypothermia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-08 13:24:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16430225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Set between seasons, Danny and Colleen's search for K'un Lun goes a little awry.





	Avalanche Weather

**Author's Note:**

> For a prompt on Tumblr: _Colleen, Danny, Claire + hypothermia = <3._ I didn't manage to work Claire in here, alas (though she's mentioned).
> 
> For my h/c bingo wildcard square, "hypothermia".

Colleen's last sight of Danny was a cascade of snow and collapsing rock as the ledge went out from under him and he vanished into the abyss below.

She couldn't even scream his name. All she could do was stand and stare.

It had been three days since they'd discovered K'un Lun missing. Since then, Danny had been more withdrawn than she'd ever seen him; even in New York, he'd been sunnier than this. But it was as if the loss of the city had broken something in him -- or perhaps more accurately, driven him to a kind of obsession that she thought might give her a taste of what he'd been like while he was trying to obtain the Iron Fist.

They'd been canvassing the mountains, desperately searching for ... well, she wasn't even sure. You couldn't lose a whole city. At least, not by any normal means. Danny thought it was possible he'd taken a wrong turn (but the monks' bodies put a lie to that, she thought); he also thought it was possible the city might have been able to connect to this world in some different place (but if so, she didn't see how they could possibly find it through brute-force searching of a huge and desolate wilderness).

But she knew it was just that he felt like he had to be doing something. She understood it all too well. If you slowed down, you started thinking. 

So they had been going nonstop for the last three days, stopping for brief, cold camps to melt a little snow for water over a camp stove and catch a couple hours of sleep before going on. It was getting to the point where Colleen had been working hard to convince him to slow down, because they were both getting exhausted, exhausted people made mistakes, and mistakes could be fatal in a place like this.

But in the end it wasn't a mistake that got him, not really. He couldn't have known how treacherous that section of the path would turn out to be. And now she stood staring at a gaping opening in the ledge in front of her, and Danny was just ... gone.

Crazily, she couldn't help thinking of the way that Danny had used the Fist to bash a tomb into the side of the mountain to lay the monks to rest before they'd gone on ahead to search for K'un Lun. The mountain was their tomb, and now it would be his ....

_Don't be melodramatic,_ she told herself, peering over the edge as she clenched her teeth on the urge to sob or scream. _You know how fast and agile he is. Plus, he's got the Fist._

She couldn't see much below, not with the wind whipping snow around and an early blue dusk already coming down on the world. It had been dazzlingly sunny yesterday, but now the clouds had closed back in, trapping them in a chilly white prison. The exposed parts of her face stung with wind-scattered snow. The chasm below them could be fifty feet deep, or two thousand.

The last rushing and clattering of rocks and chunks of snow had died away, leaving only the keening of the wind. "Danny?" she called cautiously. She didn't want to yell it too loudly, afraid of setting off another slide.

She was drawing breath to call again when his voice came up to her from below, thin and young-sounding. "Colleen?"

Her knees went weak, and she clutched at the icy rock face beside her. She had to blink back tears that had nothing to do with the wind, and forced down the first thing she wanted to ask him ( _Are you all right_ ) in favor of the only question that really mattered right now. "Can you get back up on your own?"

Silence, then a thready wisp of his voice, caught by the wind: "I don't think so."

She took a slow breath. He was probably hurt, then. How badly didn't really matter yet; he might not even know himself. "I'm going to anchor a rope," she called down. "I'll be there as quick as I can."

"Okay," he called back.

And that wasn't like him either, that small, compliant word. He was tired, he was grieving, he was depressed -- _why_ had she let him drag both of them around this mountain for so long, when she should've just pitched a tent and sat on him if she had to ... or, no, what she should've done was haul him back to the village halfway down the mountain they'd used as a staging ground for their trip, where they could get a warm bed and a hot meal and a bath. As it was, their supplies were low and they hadn't stopped long enough to recharge in so long that they were both running on fumes. God ... the number of ways this could have gone bad, could still go bad ... They didn't even have enough food left to wait out a long spell of bad weather, and she wasn't entire sure she could find her way back down the mountain, what with all the wandering around they'd done. This was _stupid._

But even as she cursed at herself in her own head, she was hammering pitons into the rock and tying off a rope. They'd passed a wider place in the trail just a few hundred yards down that would do for a campsite in a pinch; it had some fallen boulders to shelter them from the wind, and enough space to set up the tent, which she figured they were both going to need. She took off her pack and tied a loop of rope around it for a counterweight and also to make sure it didn't blow off the mountain while she was below.

"Danny? I'm coming down. Can you hear me?"

"I hear you," his voice came back faintly. 

Mostly she just wanted to get him to talk. She couldn't tell if the faintness was distance or weakness; he could be a hundred feet below her, or halfway down the mountain. Either way, the lack of a) chatter, and b) any sounds to indicate he was trying to climb back up to her seemed like very bad signs.

"Don't let me fall on you, now," she called down as she snapped on her carabiner, gripped the rope, and began to climb.

"I can catch you," he offered, sounding a little less thready and more like himself.

"Don't you even try," she scolded. "Tell me about your situation. I need to know what I'm climbing into."

"Okay, uh ... so, I caught a rock? Or ... the rock caught me. I'm kind of buried. I'm digging out."

Well, that didn't sound _too_ bad. Certainly not as bad as some of the more dire possibilities her mind had conjured.

Then she got far enough down the mountain to actually see him.

"My God, Danny," she whispered.

He was hung up in a cleft in the rocks. From up here it looked tiny, a little pool of snow with jagged black rocks jutting out of it. She could just make him out as a splash of color from his coat. And below that, the mountain fell away in a sheer drop, going down and down, until it vanished in wind-swirled white nothingness. Her stomach swooped, looking into that abyss.

If Danny had gone over that ...

If her rope gave way ...

_But he didn't, and it's not going to. We're going to climb out of here, and I'm going to pitch our tent and make us some hot soup, and as soon as it gets light in the morning we're climbing down this mountain and finding a hostel and making plans like ADULTS instead of running all over this mountain like we've been doing._

She navigated the last stretch of rocky-icy mountainside with great care, all too aware that the place Danny had hung up could be as unstable as the part of the trail that had nearly swept him to his death. Mindful of that issue, she balanced lightly on her toes while trying to keep as much of her weight on the rope as possible.

Danny wasn't kidding about having to dig himself out. He was buried up to the waist, and as soon as she leaned down to help him, Colleen realized why he was having problems, because the snow was hard packed from its violent slide down the mountain. Danny was scooping clumsily at it with his left hand. His right was tucked up against his chest. There was clearly something wrong with it. Which probably meant he couldn't use the Fist either, she realized. There was snow plastered all over his hair, and he'd lost his hat.

"Hey," she said, putting her arm around his shoulders while still trying not to rest too much weight on the unstable snow. He was shivering. She also noticed -- she hadn't at first, in the gathering dusk with snow all over him -- that he was trying to dig at the snow with a bare hand. His fingers were purplish and bleeding. Colleen stripped off her mitten and wrapped her warm fingers around his.

"Danny, wow. Did you lose your gloves?"

"I ... I guess so?" He blinked at her. There was even snow plastered on his eyelashes.

Okay, this wasn't good. He was very cold and possibly a little bit in shock. She needed to get him warm, fast.

"C'mon. Let's get you out of here. Take off your pack; that'll help."

"Oh. Yeah. Okay." He started trying to worm out of the straps, grimacing in pain. Colleen revised her guess about his arm from "sprained" to "broken." "But we need it, though," he said, stopping in mid-squirm. 

"I'll haul it up with the rope. We gotta get you up first. Oh, wait." Her fingers hurt just looking at his swollen, blueish ones as he fumbled clumsily at his pack straps. She pulled her own mitten, still warm from her body heat, over his bare hand. Then she helped him get the pack off, and clipped him to the rope before she started trying to chip his legs free. 

She wished she'd brought an ice axe, before remembering that Danny had one strapped to his pack; apparently he wasn't the only one not thinking clearly. They were both exhausted and cold. _We'll be warm soon,_ she promised herself, and chipped the hard-packed snow away from his legs, while Danny clumsily tried to help. Her fingers were freezing but her spare gloves were up with her pack, and she didn't want to take the time to dig around in Danny's.

"Okay, you're gonna go up ahead of me," she told him. "I'll be right behind you."

She tied the end of the rope to his pack straps, and they made a slow procession up the mountainside, Danny climbing as best he could with one arm, and Colleen boosting him from behind. She'd pulled her bare hand inside her coat sleeve; it was simply too cold to have her fingers exposed that long without risking frostbite, but it didn't make climbing easier. At the top, she helped Danny get over the edge of the ledge by pushing from underneath, then struggled with it herself until he grabbed her with his cold-clumsy hand and pulled. She tumbled on top of him, murmuring apologies as he made a sharp sound of pain, and they lay there in a heap for a moment or two.

Colleen forced herself back to her feet despite her weariness, because it was getting dark and they had to get back down that path to the campsite she remembered. She didn't dare send Danny on ahead, not in the condition he was in. She dragged up his pack, hurrying as fast as she could. There were a couple other things she wanted to do and she felt she was racing against a clock with darkness coming down as fast as it was. Once she got Danny's pack up, she dug out a fresh glove for herself from her own, and then freed the rope from the cliff face. She left herself and Danny clipped together; if one of them fell off again, the other could break their fall.

_Or fall with them ..._

"I can take that," Danny told her, reaching for his pack with his good hand. 

"You worry about moving you," she told him. "I can handle both packs for a little while."

She dragged Danny's pack (tied to the rope) and carried her own. Danny went in front, but she was right behind him with her free hand gripping the back of his coat, steering him as his steps faltered or stumbled.

They reached the wide place in the trail before she thought they ought to have, and she stood for a moment staring at it critically in the growing dark. It was much narrower than she remembered. Was this really the place? But travel on these mountain paths always seemed faster going down...

"Colleen?" Danny said uncertainly. He was swaying where he stood.

Even if there was a wider place farther down the trail, this would do. "I'm going to pitch the tent," she told him. "Get yourself some dry clothes and get out the sleeping bags so we're ready to go when I get it set up."

She pitched the tent as far from the edge as possible, chipping with the ice axe to make a flattish place. Jagged rocks that had cleft away from the hillside narrowed the space available for the tent, but made it less likely they'd blow off the mountainside or get swept away in another avalanche. It was not an ideal campsite. But it was what they had.

Danny had the sleeping bags out by then, sitting with the packs abutting him on either side as he pawed through them one-handed. Colleen unrolled and unzipped the sleeping bags, pushing them into the tent ahead of them, then got Danny's snow-covered coat and pants off outside the tent and pushed him inside in his underwear. She handed in the packs and then followed, leaving her snowy gear at the entrance.

Danny was sitting on the unrolled sleeping bag, looking dazed. Colleen gently manhandled him into it before shedding her clothes and crawling in after him. She pulled both sleeping bags around them and fumbled with the zippers until she got them zipped into a mega-bag.

"You don't feel as cold as I was afraid of," she murmured, rubbing her hand down Danny's shoulder.

After a moment, he said sleepily, "I can use my chi to help heal myself and deal with the cold. I've been doing it all along, actually. But it drains me. I'll need food."

"Useful."

"Mmm." He turned his face into her shoulder. "Still pretty cold."

"I think you need to get warmer," she murmured, wrapping him up in her arms and putting a leg over his.

It was tempting to just stay here forever, as the sleeping bag nest slowly warmed and Danny melted inch by inch against her, but he was right: they needed food. Dealing with the cold and wind drained the energy out of a person even if they weren't actively manipulating their own chi. Reluctantly, she peeled herself off Danny and sat up. It was utterly dark in the tent, and bitterly cold; the wind screamed outside. Gooseflesh prickled her bare arms as she felt around for the bundle of clothing Danny had pulled out of the packs. She found it eventually, sorted out something vaguely sweatshirt-shaped and pulled it over her head. It was Danny's, from the size, but it didn't really matter; she just needed to not freeze while she found the packs and got out a light so she could set up the camp stove.

Soon she had the camp stove hissing under a pan of water packed with melting ice chipped from around the tent entrance. She retreated under the covers while the ice melted, then sat up to stir a soup mix into it.

"Energy bar?" she asked, passing one under the covers, and Danny snaffled that along with two more. He hadn't been kidding about needing food. She chewed on one herself while she watched the soup simmer in the reflected light from the camp stove. The tent was starting to warm up a little, or maybe she was just getting used to it.

"You should let me look at that arm," she said over her shoulder. "And don't tell me you'll heal it with chi."

"Well, I _am_ healing it with chi," Danny said sleepily from under the covers.

"Yes, fine, that may be so, but you still need bandages and painkillers, all right?"

"Mmmm."

"Don't fall asleep in there." She poked him under the sleeping bag. "Come on out, have something hot, and let me see if it's broken."

He sat up, wincing, and she sucked in a breath at the bruises mottling his torso, black in the dim light. His right arm, curled against his chest, was one big bruise. And he was shivering already in the chilly air in the tent.

"I didn't realize you got that banged up," she said, pulling a sweater around his shoulders.

Danny was smiling faintly. "Don't think I did either. I didn't really feel most of this at the time. You don't need to look at me that way, I'm not gonna break."

Yeah, because he was used to dealing with people who bruised him and hurt him, and left him to care for his injuries in a stone cell, alone. In Bakuto's dojo, she'd had to deal with pain, of course. Bakuto had no time for weak students, and she'd worked hard to be worthy of him -- it hurt, now, in an entirely different way, thinking about how hard she had tried to live up to the example she'd thought he set. But there was no cruelty in Bakuto's training. After sparring, there were hot baths and salve for sore muscles, and the inevitable serious training injuries were treated with care. 

She had felt stupid, the first time she broke two fingers when her training partner's bokken glanced off hers and smacked into her hand, and managed to successfully hide it for nearly a full day before one of the other students had ratted her out. To her horrified embarrassment, Bakuto had cared for her personally. She had ducked her head with shame while he taped her swollen, discolored fingers, and at the end he'd tilted her face up with two fingers under her chin.

"A broken body cannot fight," he'd told her. "Care for your body as you do for your sword. You would not put your katana away dirty and scuffed and dull, would you?" She had shaken her head in genuine horror at the thought; proper weapon care had been drummed into all of them. "Your body is also a weapon. Treat it as such."

Danny spoke of his teachers with respect, but Colleen thought that in Bakuto's dojo they would not have been worthy of being called _sensei._

Now, in a freezing-cold tent on a mountainside, with wind rattling its walls, she got out the jar of salve she'd brought with her from New York -- Bakuto's recipe that he'd taught all of his students to make, to care for their own hurts, though knowing what she now knew about him, she wondered if there was more than just the ordinary mild analgesics in its oils and herbs. Danny sipped from the cup of soup she gave him and leaned against her as she rubbed it gently into his sore places. His skin was chilly to the touch and she hurried, knowing she needed to get him back into the sleeping bag.

His arm, she decided with a lifetime's skill at assessing her own training injuries, was probably not broken after all, just badly bruised and sprained. She wrapped it up and then checked his fingers for frostbite and rubbed the salve into the cuts and scrapes where he'd battered his hands on the ice. 

As she massaged his hand, the thought occurred to her that she needed to try to do this kind of thing for him more often. Danny was a "taking care of people" kind of person; he never neglected to pick up the exact kind of food she liked, give her a massage, ask her how her day was. She tried hard to do the same, but she was so used to being on her own that those little gestures didn't come easily to her.

_And it's not as if giving him a massage is a terrible hardship, after all ..._

"You're a good nurse," he murmured.

"I'm no Claire. I wish she was here."

"We should call her when we get back somewhere there's cell reception."

It was the first time since they had discovered the missing city that he'd mentioned New York or the fact that they still had people back there. It was a sign, she thought, that he might be coming back a little from the dark place where he'd been.

"I'll send her pictures of your bruises and tell her, look what she's missing."

Danny laughed softly. It was also the first time he'd laughed in days. She pressed her cheek against the top of his head and closed her eyes for a minute.

"You need to eat too," he murmured. She snorted and kissed the top of his head.

"I will. You get back under the covers."

She bundled him back into the sleeping bag and made more soup for herself, sitting with her legs in the shared sleeping bag and Danny pressed against her. By the time she finished up and snuggled in with him, he was asleep and almost felt warm again. Colleen tucked herself up against him in the dark, pulling the sleeping bag over them until they were burrowed inside with just a tiny aperture for air.

Danny didn't wake up when she snuggled against him, at least she didn't think so, but he automatically put an arm over her. She sighed and wrapped her arms around him, wanting to drive out the lingering chill -- from both of them -- the only way she could.

She had thought that as soon as she tried to sleep, she would be unable to stop a full Technicolor replay of that awful moment when she'd seen Danny go off the ledge. But in truth, it wasn't too bad. Having him here, in her arms, basically okay and steadily warming up, grounded her and made it ... well, not okay. Not quite yet. But better.

_And we'll get through whatever else we need to get through. Figure out what happened to Danny's city. Deal with the Hand, I guess._

_Hey, we fought a mountain today. The Hand aren't so scary compared to that._

She ran a hand up Danny's back. He sighed in his sleep and settled more closely against her, and she felt herself smiling in the dark.


End file.
